So it's fair to say that Chrony isn't suitable for running on stratum 1 servers, of which there are a few hundred, maybe up to at most a few thousand publically available in the world[1]. For the millions of Linux servers, laptops and desktops that aren't and will never be stratum 1 NTP servers Chrony should be just fine, shouldn't it?

This is not correct anymore, the touchpad works fine under Ubuntu 13.10 if you install it using the Chrubuntu scripts. The Chrubuntu author has integrated the patches from Chrome dev Beson Leung into the Chrubuntu scripts so that it automatically patches the Ubuntu kernel for you.

And just to be clear, I'm talking about the Chrubuntu method of installing a full-fledged Ubuntu installation here as a the only OS or a dual-boot, i.e. not the Ubuntu-using-the-ChromeOS-kernel setup of Crouton.

I'd agree with you on all those points, but it's still worth point out how terrible Australian high schools' computer education is. When I did the HSC in NSW in 2000 the study for the exam was basically just memorising a list of definitions of computer terminology. There was no attempt to asses actual skills. Instead they just ensured students could give a coherent definition of terms like 'Wide Area Network' or explain the difference between a 'minicomputer' and a 'mainframe' (yes, even in 2000 this is how far behind the curriculum was).

So even though I wish they'd actually turn the computing curriculum into something worthwhile instead of whoring it out to self-interested vendors, the Microsoft course might actually be an improvement.

This is spot on. I'd guess that the tendency to redefine Western European countries like France, Germany, Sweden and even the UK (with its NHS and high welfare spending) as 'socialist' comes from the rhetoric of a particular American political party opposed to the introduction of universal healthcare. Or from people opposed to that particular party who want to draw a definite line between the US system and what's done in every other western developed country (including ones outside Europe like Australia, Canada, NZ).

Of course there's no definite, scientific definition for 'socialism' but academcis and political parties in these countries usually define their system as a 'mixed economy' or a 'Social market economy (German: Soziale Marktwirtschaft)'. Which basically means a capitalist based-economy where the majority of GDP remains in private ownership but the government takes a significant amount (33-45%, sometimes more) to fund a welfare state and other programs, and the government has significant power to intervene in markets to ensure fair competition, prevent environmental damage etc.

+1 to this. I've worked as a Linux sysadmin and enjoyed scripting and all that but fiddling around flashing a phone just isn't fun. It's an apprehensive time thinking whether you have the exact right firmware image or whether the phone will be a brick.

I hope one day I can just install new FW on my phone as easy as an 'apt-get install' on a Debian system.

Postage costs in Australia are ridiculous. I'm an Aussie living in the UK, I wanted to send my parents in Sydney a small USB webcam so we could Skype properly (the less said about the in-built webcam and microphone on their laptop the better).

It cost *exactly* the same ($42) to order it from a local online shop located in Paramatta (another Sydney suburb less then 20kms away from my parents) as it did to order from Amazon UK with the shipping address set to my parents' house in Sydney.

What's even more ridiculous is that it wasn't that the webcam was priced particularly high in Australia, it was that Australia Post's standard $13 fee for a small package within the same city was almost as much as Amazon UK's delivery fee to send it 18000km to the other side of the world!

There's a big [citation needed] on that. I don't know about Finland but half of the websites in the UK would be offline by now if that were law, and the German constitutional court would've struck any such law down in a heartbeat just like they did with the data retention laws: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8545772.stm.

All the UK's police forces keep armed units available and on patrol 24 hours a day[1]. The number of armed police in each force varies, with more rural counties having less and forces that cover a large city having more[2], but the idea that you could go on an almost unstoppable GTA-style rampage in the UK since the police are mostly unarmed is bogus.

Not to mention that if something more serious, like the Kenya shopping mall attack, happened here it's likely be turned over to the SAS, who have well proven they can deal with this kind of thing (see the Iranian embassy siege for e.g.).

It's true that electritcty is only a minority of Germany's total consumption. But one of the goals of the "Energiewende" laws passed by the current government is to increase the share of renewable energy in the *total* energy consumption from 10% in 2011 to 60% in 2050 (the renewables-share in electricity generation should be increased to 80% by 2050).

Whether they can do it or not remains to be seen but it's great that at least one major industrialised nation is making a realistic attempt to use renewable energy for the majority of it's consumption.

timbo234 writes: BBC News reports that an unknown number of legitimate websites, including well-known radio and TV magazine radiotimes.com, have been caught up in a High-Court ordered block against First Row Sports, "which offers unauthorised streams of football games". According to the High-Court "ISPs are wholly reliant on the rights-holders accurately identifying which IPs should be blocked".

For the time-being some of the major ISPs (with the exception of Talk Talk) have unblocked First Row Sports so that the legitimate websites caught up in the block are available again. However this isn't good enough for the Premier League, the rights-holder who ordered the blocking, who insist that they alone get to decide when or how the legitimate sites are freed from the blocking: "the court order that requires internet service providers to block this website clearly states that any issues they have in implementing the block must be raised with the Premier League before taking any further action".

Is it really a good system that owners of blocked legitimate sites should have to beg so-called 'rights-holders', who may themselves have little technical skill or understanding of how the Internet works, to be freed from their unfair blocking? Surely the implementation of these blocks (leaving aside the argument over whether they should be allowed at all) is best left to ISPs who have the technical knowledge to get it right?

LTE Advanced already does that if is has around 67MHz of bandwidth available, and you are the only one using the cell.

This. Correct me if I'm wrong here but I thought the quoted maximum speeds for mobile networks are always *per-tower* not *per-user*, so you could only ever get those speeds in the real world if a virus wipes out 95+% of the local population in your area, leaving you the only one using the tower.

If that was the point you were trying to make why didn't you actually write it, instead of going on with a load of nonsense about users having to worry about which DE toolkit an application was built with?

It's not even a very good one point - given the vast difference between Linux and Windows' *minimum* memory usage there's plenty of room for an Ubuntu box to load the toolkit from another DE without even using up the minimum memory usage for a Windows 7 or 8 box. Not to mention that different Windows applications use multiple different GUI toolkits, so your average Windows box in use will need even more memory to work.

If you want a real world example: I'm running 64-bit Kubuntu 12.04 with bells and whistles like desktop effects turned on. The computer's been up for nearly 2 days, in which time I've run applications using both KDE/QT, GNOME/GTK and Mono.NET GUI toolkits. I have Firefox running currently and memory usage is only 1GB, that's half the *minimum* requirement for 64-bit WIndows 7 or 8.